This southeast-looking photograph depicts the flat coastal plain surrounding rapidly developing Houston. Major highway systems converging near downtown, Galveston Bay, and the Gulf of Mexico provide worldwide land and water connections. An extensive sediment plume in Galveston Bay has a small extension of the plume bleeding into the Gulf of Mexico. Visible are large cultivated fields west of Houston, mainly north of Interstate Highway 10; dark, forested lands, primarily pine forests, to the north; and muddy Lake Houston, a reservoir on the San Jacinto River, to the northeast.